1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for workload management. In particular, the present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for workload management in which a class share and tier structure is utilized.
2. Description of Related Art
As distributed computing systems become larger, the number of servers in these computing systems increases. As a result, system maintenance becomes an increasingly large source of cost in maintaining the computing system. In an effort to reduce this cost, a computing system may make use of server consolidation wherein workloads from many different server systems (print, database, general user, transaction processing systems, and the like) are combined into a single large system. The drawback to such consolidation is that the workloads from these servers now must compete for system resources such as central processing unit (CPU) time, memory and the like.
In view of the above, it would be beneficial to have an apparatus and method to manage the workload of a computing system, such as a consolidated server system, such that workloads are provided system resources in a manner consistent with the importance of each component workload relative to the other component workloads.